Case Studies in Neural Therapy:

Chronic Head Pain from a Craniotomy Scar

Anne Hill, ND

Rebecca, a 51-year-old patient, was a referred from a local fascial counterstrain practitioner who understands how important neural therapy can be as an adjunctive treatment to their work with pain management. Rebecca’s provider had run into a wall with getting the tissue around her scar to mobilize enough to help with her constant head pain.

Rebecca had had a middle fossa craniotomy performed 10 years before she visited with me. What led her to the craniotomy was that she had fallen in the bathroom and hit the side of her head on the toilet. She had had severe head pain ever since that point in time. Additionally, she had a significant history of head injuries with eight auto accidents and two diagnosed concussions. She had also had facial reconstructive surgery around her nose and sinus area after being bitten by a dog on her face twenty-five years prior.

The craniotomy was performed because her physicians had found a semi-circular canal dehiscence, which is a tiny hole from the inner ear that opens up to the brain. All other medication trials and treatments had been exhausted with no relief of her pain until she was finally diagnosed with this condition and offered surgery.

 This is an interesting condition. It is found more frequently in females and is something that is more commonly found in patients who have had lots of head injury history. Many of the symptoms are a sense of fullness in the ear canal, tinnitus, balance issues, and dizziness, as well as brain fog and autophony, which is where you can hear your own voice from inside your head in a loud and distorted way.

 The surgery did help with some of these initial symptoms, but the scar left her with some remaining symptoms as well as new ones. “When I use my eyes on the computer or to read for close-up work for an extended period (2-3 hours), I have numbness, strain, pain, tightness,” she described. The tightness began at her right eyebrow and below her right eye. She also mentioned that the tightness continued to run laterally over her ear to the back of the neck and sometimes down into her shoulder. She also had near-constant headaches that got worse throughout the day as she used her eyes or chewed. The pain contributed to her ongoing sense of fatigue and brain fog.

The craniotomy scar was a long one. Rebecca had 15 stitches beginning at the middle of the opening of her right ear extending circularly up to the very top of her head. Her jaw muscle was also cut during this surgery, which contributed to a lot of the discomfort, especially with any jaw movement.

Along with the chronic headaches and feeling of tightness and tension, she also had a sensation of numbness from the scar line that extended beyond and across the tissue immediately surrounding the scar. At this point, she was on disability from her chronic pain and she couldn’t drive because of her physical condition.  She also suffered from extreme anxiety while driving due to her history of multiple car accidents.

I treated Rebecca’s craniotomy scar by injecting it superficially along the scar line with about 8 cc of 1% procaine. I also injected superficially along her sternocleidomastoid, as this helps to open up the anterior lymphatic drainage from the head, sinuses, and down the neck to the thoracic duct. She had been experiencing years of inflammation in that area so I wanted to make sure that her body had a way to clear some of the inflammatory compounds.

When Rebecca returned 2 weeks later she said she had not had any head pain since the initial injections, and in addition, she could feel movement of the skin surrounding her skull and on her face. We re-treated her scar at this follow-up appointment just to make sure that we were able to release everything, and at this time I also treated a large scar on her left forehead area. This was from when she had another head trauma as a child where she described accidentally running into a wall.

I did not see Rebecca again for a year. When she did come back, it was for help with another injury to her hand.  She said that the head scar treatment had changed her life. She was no longer in chronic head pain, and her daily function and activities had increased enough that she could go camping and hiking at national parks in an RV with her husband.

It is incredible to me that though the medicine of neural therapy grew up in alignment with modern anesthesia, this injection technique has become a lost art in the hands of allopathic medicine. I believe much of this is linked to an indifference to the importance of the fascia and the body's connective tissue. Somewhere along the line, the organs, bones, brain, and genes became the focus points of medicine, seen as holding the main keys to our health. But now, I believe, the time of our container is at hand. The vehicle that carries around our organs, bones, brain, and genes is stepping into the limelight. With newly discovered science around connective tissue, we are giving greater scrutiny to how this system moves information and uses the autonomic nervous system and the immune system to communicate important information to every area of the body.  Adhesions and scar tissue block this communication, lead to microbial imbalance, drive lymphatic congestion, and directly contribute to chronic inflammation. All modern medical knowledge now points to inflammation as being the main contributor to every modern ailment from which we suffer, from heart disease to dementia, cancer to diabetes. We have no other known tools to treat scars and adhesions other than neural injection therapy. It’s such a simple technique. More physicians could help with a lot of the chronic pain patients that we see walk into our offices every day.